Remembering lost paintings: Vanessa Bell’s The Nursery

Abstract

During 1930—1932, Vanessa Bell worked on a large-scale, ambitious painting called The Nursery, a nostalgic delineation of childhood and motherhood. The subsequent loss of the painting has tended to curtail rather than to colour interpretation; in contrast, my reading interrogates The Nursery’s status as a piece of lost art. The work survives hauntingly through a multiplicity of related visual and textual objects, including contemporary photographs, personal correspondence, criticism and fiction. I analyse these as memorials, questioning the kind of nostalgia required to see the lost Nursery , and setting up an interaction between two sites of nostalgia in operation here: within the lost painting, and around it.